Participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories.

This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take action to solve their own problems and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people and to help them implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.

This music video (featuring a remix of the Tracy Chapman song ‘Let It Rain’) endeavours to highlight the urgent need of our brothers and sisters in Horn of Africa, whose lives are endangered by the worst drought in sixty years. More than 10 million people (including those in the worst affected areas of Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia).

United Nations and international aid agencies say the crisis is overwhelming their ability to provide assistance to the millions of people who are suffering… and as the agencies are overstretched and under-funded, they are appealing for more help from the international community.
The U.N. Children’s Fund estimates more than two million young children from the Horn of Africa are malnourished, and in need of urgent life-saving actions. It says half a million of those children are facing imminent life-threatening conditions… and warns that many of the children may be left with long-lasting physical and mental problems.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are fully stretched in various locations inside Somalia, as well as assisting exhausted refugees crossing Somalia’s borders into Ethiopia and Kenya.

According to World Vision… Risks of the outbreak of disease are growing, and people’s access to food and water is in jeopardy. Children are among those most vulnerable in the worst hit countries of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia.

Save the Children has advised that more than a quarter of children in the worst-hit parts of Kenya are now dangerously malnourished… and in Somalia, malnutrition rates have reached 30 percent in some areas, making the Horn of Africa one of the hungriest places on earth.
Save the Children has already launched a major humanitarian response in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia… feeding tens of thousands of underweight children; providing life-saving medical treatment; and getting clean water to remote communities. But with the situation worsening by the day – and no more rain due till late September – Save the Children urgently needs money to dramatically ramp up its response.

According to Matt Croucher, Save the Children’s regional emergency manager for East Africa… “Thousands of children could starve if we don’t get life-saving help to them fast”… “Parents no longer have any way to feed their children; they’ve lost their animals; their wells have dried up; and food is too expensive to afford”… “We can stop this tragedy unfolding, but we only have half the money we need. We urgently need to raise the rest so we can save more children’s lives.”

On 4th November 2009, the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal led a tour of Durban that conveys the gritty reality faced by ordinary Durbanites. This video documents the highlights of the tour, including the ‘toxic’ South Durban Industrial Basin, the tented community of Crossmoor and, on a more positive note, the development of an organic community garden and biodigester in the township of Cato Manor.

Reviews/discussion

When critically‑minded people visit Durban and seek out a ‘reality tour’ typically denied by the mainstream tourist circuit, one of the stops is the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu‑Natal. Located at the highest point in Durban (the top floors of Memorial Tower Building in Glenwood), the Centre introduces sympathetic visitors to the work of leading social activists and environmentalists. The sites that kombi‑taxis arranged by CCS reach include an inner‑city tense with resistance to xenophobia and gentrification, the largest petrochemical complex in a residential area in Africa, a variety of shack settlements and working‑class ‘African’, ‘Indian’ and ‘coloured’ neighbourhoods, the hotly‑contested source of Durban’s water at Inanda Dam, and the university environs.

John Vidal in Durban, www.guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 December 2011: Why south Durban stinks of rotten cabbage, eggs and cat wee

In the ‘centre of toxic Africa’, residents say they can identify nausea, drowsiness, vomiting and headaches by industrial sources.

There’s the metaphorical whiff of diplomats burning the midnight oil to find a deal at the the UN climate talks. But 5km away in south Durban, the air really does smell of rotten cabbage, cat wee and almonds.

With two crude oil refineries, South Africa‘s two biggest paper mills, its biggest container port, a dozen chemical companies, several major landfill sites and a huge number of factories together producing 80% of South Africa‘s oil products and much of its industrial emissions, south Durban locals have learned to identify the coughs, nausea, drowsiness, vomiting and headaches they suffer by their sources.

Oil companies are said to create a stink of a cocktail of rotten eggs and burned matches, a carworks reeks of ethanol and the vinegar smell comes from a leather company.

South African Environmental Justice struggles against “toxic” petrochemical industries in South Durban: The Engen Refinery Case

This case study explores the South Durban community’s struggle against disproportionate exposure to a hazardous environment and sulphur dioxide pollution, and at the same time, being faced with “clear and present” health hazards linked to petrochemical industrial production. To unpack the environmental justice challenges facing post-apartheid South Africa, the case study examines the role played by the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance in articulating environmental injustices and poor environmental responsibility of the petrochemical industry in South Africa.

TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai tells the story of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization encouraging rural women and families to plant trees in community groups, and follows Maathai, the movement’s founder and the first environmentalist and African woman to win the Nobel Prize. Maathai discovered her life’s work by reconnecting with the rural women with whom she had grown up. They told her they were walking long distances for firewood, and that clean water was scarce. The soil was disappearing from their fields and their children were suffering from malnutrition. “Well, why not plant trees?” she suggested.

Maathai soon discovered that tree planting had a ripple effect of empowering change. In the mid-1980s, Kenya was under the repressive regime of Daniel arap Moi, whose dictatorship outlawed group gatherings and the right of association. In tending their nurseries, women had a legitimate reason to gather outside their homes and discuss the roots of their problems. They soon found themselves working against deforestation, poverty, ignorance, embedded economic interests and government corruption; they became a national political force that helped to bring down the country’s 24-year dictatorship.

Using archival footage and first-person accounts, the film documents dramatic political confrontations of 1980s and 1990s Kenya and captures Maathai’s infectious determination and unwavering courage through in-depth conversations with the film’s subjects. TAKING ROOT captures a world view in which nothing is perceived as impossible. The film also presents an awe-inspiring profile of one woman’s three-decade journey of courage to protect the environment, ensure gender equality, defend human rights and promote democracy—all sprouting from the achievable act of planting trees.

“We have just completed the month-long book tour [The Challenge for Africa] and … hardly was there a place we went that people did not mention Taking Root. It has been a wonderful project… I hope the film will continue to inspire people across the globe especially as the message is so fitting for our time.”

“[Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai] portrays a woman’s fight against all odds not to be a victim in her own natural environment. Indeed, ‘the tree woman’ and her initiative of planting trees led to the emancipation of women in her community. Through this act, she became the epitome of success and a role model of an enriching woman.”read more…

Jury,
International Images Film Festival for Women,
Zimbabwe upon presenting the Best Documentary Award

“Taking Root underscores the critical importance of education to a social movement. It portrays a vision of education that is not about changing people’s heads, but ultimately changing the conditions under which people live. We can talk in the classroom about education for social change, but this extraordinary film provides a model for change that engages and inspires. It is worth a hundred hours of classroom talk…both the film and the woman are truly extraordinary!”

We hope that TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai will help viewers to see their relationship to the natural world in a different way. The connection between a healthy environment and healthy communities is at the core of the work of the Green Belt Movement, the NGO that Wangari Maathai founded in 1977, when she realized that the problems the rural women were having were directly related to their degraded environment. In taking steps to ameliorate their situation by planting trees, these women were not only addressing their immediate problems but the root cause of those problems as well.

Viewers have been moved and inspired by TAKING ROOT, and we hope that inspiration leads to action. The path that Wangari Maathai took from environmental justice to social and economic justice and then, ultimately, to peace, is what inspires audiences. They start to make connections that they have perhaps not made before.

In that spirit, we have partnered with the Katahdin Foundation to produce an action guide. The guide encourages people to take action in their local communities by becoming aware of trees and encouraging people to plant trees, and to make the connections between tree-planting, clean air, strong children and healthier communities and ultimately a healthier planet. We hope that TAKING ROOT encourages viewers to ask questions such as, “Who is living in degraded environments in the United States and why?” and then to seek solutions.

We also hope that the historical context of the film will raise awareness about how colonialism across the globe has been, and continues to be, at the root of environmental destruction in the “developing world.” Viewing the land as a commodity, and the extraction of resources as more important than anything else, has led us to the global climate crisis in which we find ourselves today. This way of doing business in the developing world continues without taking into account the livelihoods, well being and environmental sustainability of local communities; we take what we need and leave.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was filmed in 10 countries and follows Kristof, WuDunn, and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union, and Olivia Wilde on a journey to tell the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls. The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality — which needlessly claim one woman every 90 seconds — present to us the single most vital opportunity of our time: the opportunity to make a change. All over the world women are seizing this opportunity.

Reviews/discussion

Women and girls across the globe face threats — trafficking, prostitution, violence, discrimination — every day of their lives. But hope endures. Brave men and women have developed innovative ways of helping those living in some of the most challenging conditions.

A girl in India is on the brink of being sold into the commercial sex trade. A young mother in Somaliland may die giving birth. In Sierra Leone, a girl has been raped and must confront the norms of her community. A women whose husband abused her now helps those suffering at the hands of their spouses.

These are the stories of individuals who represent hundreds of millions of women and girls around the world who are victimized and abused, denied access to education, medicine or property, prevented from reaching their full potential and contributing in more meaningful ways to their communities. These are stories of dehumanizing violence and discrimination. But these are also stories of struggle and victories, large and small, in the face of the longest odds.

A women whose husband abused her now helps those suffering at the hands of their spouses. With a book, a teenage girl in Vietnam takes the first steps towards breaking the cycle of grinding poverty that plagues her family. Dozens of former impoverished individuals, seeking economic independence, band together to establish what will become Kenya’s fastest-growing microfinance organization.

Each of these stories puts a human face to an otherwise abstract idea or string of statistics that could never convey the true human cost of the discrimination and abuse suffered by hundreds of millions. These stories also illuminate the spirit of perseverance that is embodied by the women and girls who face these violations each day, and those who have made it their life’s mission to help them

The Half the Sky Movement is cutting across platforms to ignite the change needed to put an end to the oppression of women and girls worldwide, the defining issue of our time. Inspired by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book of the same name, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide brings together video, websites, games, blogs and other educational tools to not only raise awareness of women’s issues, but to also provide concrete steps to fight these problems and empower women. Change is possible, and you can be part of the solution. See http://www.halftheskymovement.org/pages/movement